in comparison to the shit that infects all of Latin America, Obama is almost a Milton Friedman clone.
LOL so true
I'm taxed to death for daring to earn close to U$D 2000 (more than 50% of my income goes to taxes) so you can guess I'm not happy about the current state of affairs here in Uruguay.
And import taxes over here are ridiculous, and are what makes the U$ 200 Playstation 2 possible.
I'd be surprised to hear that a PS2 actually costs $250 in Brazil.
I'm in Uruguay (next door country to Brazil), and I can confirm that it indeed does cost close to U$D 250 (more like U$ 200 here).
Stuff over here is taxed to death, especially imports, so much so that it's getting to the point it would be cheaper to get a plane ticket to the United States and buy it there (of course the fact that the United States doesn't want us to go there means most of us can't, but that's an entirely different can of worms).
And where does that money go? Pays people's salary.
If you're using the money on nonproductive stuff, then yes, you're "destroying" value.
You might quibble about whether the welfare mom's children will go on to create value - the (admittedly heartless) question is whether the future value will be a better investment that whatever value the taxpayer would have created (or would have been motivated to create, or a motivation to create or whatever).
Even if I assume that the study is true (which I don't) lets look at what kids are up against:
Studying, homework, school, and teachers.
vs.
Playing video games on the internet with friends.
You can't expect them to understand the need to study to get good grades to go to school.
I don't know how it is in the US, but over here, they don't even care about your high school grades anyway... if you passed, it's enough to get you to University, although, in neighbouring countries like Brazil, I believe there are some entrance exams - "Vestibular" - which you DO need to study for).
Nuclear does make a big target - but any centralized power system will. Not sure what the effect of a 20k non-nuclear bunker buster would be.
Wow, you Americans sure are paranoid... (if you are not American, I'll be surprised)
The nuclear energy debate has come up on my country, and the #1 issues are the fear of an accident, and how to manage waste. No-one even THOUGHT about the possibility of a terrorist attack. Makes me glad to live in Uruguay.
The distance between London and Paris is about the same as that between New York City and Washingon, D.C. You know how people who aren't on expense accounts get between NYC and Washington, D.C.? They drive.
In my experience, it's only in the US of A that they drive those kinds of distances with no alternatives, in Europe similar distances are always covered by train, and over here (Uruguay, South America), for example Montevideo to Chuy (Brazil) is also 300 km (according to Wikipedia NY-DC is 204 miles or 328 km), and most people prefer to take a bus (there is no rail) - it's still driving in a sense, but we would take a train if it was available.
Those comparisons are wrong... you should not be comparing individual EU countries to the USA as a whole... you should either compare EU to the USA, or specific states to the EU countries.
Germany: 357,000 km^2
Japan: 377,000 km^2
Compare to for example California: 423,970 km^2... you'll agree that it's a fair comparison.
Rail is not economical for all of the US... but there are parts where it absolutely would make sense.
For instance, last year I wanted to go from Toronto to NY... it's a 450 mile distance according to Google, and there are some rail options, but high-speed rail would be nice.
I made the Madrid-Seville ride on the AVE (Spanish High Speed rail), for 60 Euros, it's about the same distance, in 3 hours (compare to 10 hour car ride).
And that's why opt-out should be illegal. No exceptions. Massive fines. That would end all the spam and scamming right there, at least for the legal part (you still have to find and prosecute the guys, of course, but you don't need any huge laws).
Why is the above a flamebait? Is it the second part (the calling the Americans to action)???
Since they don't have to worry about marketing and soliciting advertising, they can devote 100% of their time and energy on reporting on the news to the best of their ability.
Not to mention they get a leftover budget for cool shows like Top Gear:)
Sorry for replying to myself, but further down the thread they raised the issues:
Terminal Server licensing restrictions
Someone mentioned Deep Freeze (haven't tried it personally but it seemed to work well at the university)
And very especially, the post about the management and "people" issue:
If this were a management board, then the question would be how do you properly set up your budgets to hold folks accountable for the areas they should be held accountable for. (snip) IT department could institute a power savings plan get no credit for the savings but be responsible for any expenses (new software) to help implement it. And if anything went wrong, some poor IT manager would be left hanging. Can you truly blame the manager for not wanting to stick his neck out for no reward?
The first two points don't sound right - ok so I'm not opening Office documents all the time, but I haven't felt them as "unresponsive" over 100Mbps Ethernet.
The point about the expensive add-ins is a good one, I hadn't considered that possibility. No-one over here has any strange add-ins or stuff, and we do have everything 100% legal (even passed a BSA audit a short time ago)
We DO have a Terminal Server on Application mode which is accessed from the outside, maybe the answer is to set up one of those for people working remotely.
On the other end is one of the few CxOs that actually does work.
"I'm trying to log into my system at work to finish up some vital reports for a meeting tomorrow and it doesn't seem to respond."
Ok, it is a plausible story... but why aren't his "vital reports" in a network? Preferrably one with good storage, backups and VPN access?
Every place where I've worked and my father's small law firm all had everything on the servers (usually mapped to), so it never matters where you're physically, if you have your credentials you can have access to your data.
And mail is accessed via some kind of webmail (usually OWA).
Not to mention I'd expect your CxO to have some notebook.
Business people have funny ideas. In my experience they want everything integrated and everyone using the same software. They think it's cool that someone that mailed once 6 months ago is in their address book.
I might be too far along the "Dark Side" (TM)... but why exactly is that a bad idea? I think it's a nifty feature, myself.
I'm under instruction to produce some stationary for outlook because the CFO wants a logo in his emails. I've explained to him that it's stupid. I've shown him base64 encoded binary attachments on the mail spool. I explained the increase in message size and storage requirements for sent email. Futile. Like the bit in American Psyhco where they're all flashing business cards, his peer group are impressed by recieving email with a company logo.
Are you stupid yourself??? Why would your CFO care about how many bytes an encoded binary attachment takes, or how it looks in base64 of all things !!! Just tell him "Yes sir, it will cost U$ XXXX in added storage costs, do you still want to go ahead sir?", that's all he wants to understand or care about.
Much like some of us don't care how exactly your car works as long as it takes you there (even though it's not a bad idea to know a bit), your CFO doesn't want to or cares to know how his logo goes.
Even further, if he thinks a company logo on his emails will result in more business opportunities, I think he's right to implement that. YOU are not the target of those logoed emails, it's other people like him !!!
/anti-rant + rant (sorry for the flamebaitish name-calling)
Jim put his money where his mouth was, and GAVE AWAY book, after book, after book. More, if you happen to be disabled, you can contact Baen Books, and they will give to you NOT ONLY the books from their free library, but their mainstream books that are in print.
Thanks, you reminded me to make a purchase at Baen's. If only for the principle of the thing (and I've enjoyed some of their novels, even Eric Flints' though it was an unremarkable potboiler IIRC)
ere at my workplace (a hospital) we just rolled out Windows XP this past September. We dumped Win2k & Novell Netware for XP and Active Directory. We won't be upgrading for a long time yet.
I made my father's office dump Novell for AD... he won't forgive me easily (sadly, I'm only half joking). Netware was STABLE (of course, you couldn't put half the stuff they wanted to put on top of it). And HP support was crap.
Isn't this basically the business model of Napster? A quick search of their website reveals the following marketing text:
Napster maintains the largest on-demand streaming and MP3 catalog - over 7 million songs - so you don't have to. Never download another file or rip another CD unless you want to. With Napster, you can easily access your music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
for which they charge $13/month.
Sounds nice. Can I move it to my portable player? Does it have unreasonable DRM? And, most important of all: will it be legal everywhere I use it?
Sadly, that's the highest barrier of entry - the stupid incompatibility of laws.
My father has bought perfectly legal Norton software, and has been told it's "illegal" in my country because he didn't "properly import" it, so it would have been cheaper had he pirated it.
If I suscribe to Napster, I'm SURE that AGADU (the local RIAA) won't recognize it as valid, just as RIAA doesn't recognize allofmp3 as valid.
And what if I cross a border? Say, I'm offered a job in a neighbouring country (Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay have some trade and work agreements - called MERCOSUR) - will it be legal there? Flying on a plane?
Stuck between paying for an "I'm not sure if it will be legal" and probably not complete catalog, and an "I'm sure it's not legal but nobody cares" model, I'll obviously choose the second. Please give me the carrot AND the stick, and I'll buy your "legal" media.
It's not as if music is dying in my country (Uruguay) - the Pilsen Rock festival gathers 1/20th of the POPULATION, and they're planning a huge mega-concert for 140.000 people daily on a 3.000.000 inhabitant country.
The chance that you LIKE a song decreases with the amount of music you try to listen to. If you can have 100 songs, you will pick your 100 favorites. If you have 40 gigs of music, chances are you hate most of it, the rest is for your friends or you are archiving it for humanity.
Hmmm... I don't see it that way.
You might want to listen to different music depending on your mood, get tired of a particular band or genre and "rediscover" it later, try out different bands or even genres.
I get tired of some music, and with the help of some websites (notably last.fm) I look for other music to try, like some, discard others, and keep up the cycle.
I'm amazed at the different music I've been able to discover, which I would never have heard about ten or twenty years ago, even if I had the time I have now.
So, would you say my few GBs of Tango are worthless? Sure, maybe I could delete it now, but I enjoyed it for a while. Same for pop, rock, metal, dance/techno and such... and I still haven't scratched the surface, I suspect. There's plenty of music being produced, and even more from the past 500? 1000? years I still haven't listened to (I would never have heard of say, Pachelbel's Canon, if not thanks to the Internet - you'll never hear it on an FM radio here)
Does it really? Or do you just think it does because you're paying for special water? Chances are your bottled water comes from a municipal water supply anyway.
If you really value purified water that highly, that's up to you. But you'll get much more value for your dollar if you buy a filter instead of paying Coca-Cola a buck or two to make coke without syrup and fizz, and ship it around the country for you. That's pretty dumb. If you're on the go and need some water now, I can understand buying a bottle. But habitually buying bottled water is just dumb.
It depends on where you live. Over here (Uruguay, SA), the tap water is drinkable (and that's about it), but we have some of the best spring waters in the world (see for example):
This happened to me too.. Drinking two sodas a day is almost equivalent to 100 carbs (sugar is a subset of carbs).
Is that true of diet sodas too? I switched to diet sodas exclusively a couple years ago... some advised me to switch to straight water, but I want some taste:) - and a dietitian told me diet sodas were OK (but I wouldn't mind some second opinions).
We've had subnotebooks for decades; the Toshiba Libretto springs to mind and was very similar in form factor to the Eee 700. They've always been pricey, often more so than a full-sized laptop, and focussed on ultra-portability rather than cost. Notebooks tend, like most of the computing industry, to try for the best performance available at the target price point.
The libretto was great, my sister got an old one from my stepfather some years ago, and she was extremely happy to browse the web and play the Sims on it. Kind of what she'd be doing with a netbook. Good point there.
you might think the huge 4x4 the MILF next door takes the kids to school in is massive, but really, it's a bitty little Toyota, and it is a fair chunk smaller than the obnoxious Fords, Hummers, and tricked out Escalades you get elsewhere in the world.
Surely, by "elsewhere in the world" you mean the US? I've NEVER seen an Escalade outside the US, and there are about a dozen Hummers between here (Uruguay) and Argentina (about 50 million people) and they're just curiosities, not something you expect to actually see or drive
Slashdot Mirror
in comparison to the shit that infects all of Latin America, Obama is almost a Milton Friedman clone.
LOL so true
I'm taxed to death for daring to earn close to U$D 2000 (more than 50% of my income goes to taxes) so you can guess I'm not happy about the current state of affairs here in Uruguay.
And import taxes over here are ridiculous, and are what makes the U$ 200 Playstation 2 possible.
I'd be surprised to hear that a PS2 actually costs $250 in Brazil.
I'm in Uruguay (next door country to Brazil), and I can confirm that it indeed does cost close to U$D 250 (more like U$ 200 here).
Stuff over here is taxed to death, especially imports, so much so that it's getting to the point it would be cheaper to get a plane ticket to the United States and buy it there (of course the fact that the United States doesn't want us to go there means most of us can't, but that's an entirely different can of worms).
You were using an 8086 then? You could probably have fished a perfectly usable 286 or 386 machine out of a hospital dumpster for free
Not everybody lives in the US. Over here (Uruguay), you cannot find a 386 for free NOW, forget about the 1990s.
And I did have a modem in the family 8086 Acer 500 computer at the time Geocities launched (no Internet though).
I'm not the OP, but I did install a modem on my father's 8086 (the family computer, an Acer500 :) ) in the 90s.
I live in Uruguay, where NOBODY throws away a computer, and they were hideously expensive at the time.
I didn't have Internet access, though, I used it to access BBSs and such.
And where does that money go? Pays people's salary.
If you're using the money on nonproductive stuff, then yes, you're "destroying" value.
You might quibble about whether the welfare mom's children will go on to create value - the (admittedly heartless) question is whether the future value will be a better investment that whatever value the taxpayer would have created (or would have been motivated to create, or a motivation to create or whatever).
Even if I assume that the study is true (which I don't) lets look at what kids are up against:
Studying, homework, school, and teachers.
vs.
Playing video games on the internet with friends.
You can't expect them to understand the need to study to get good grades to go to school.
I don't know how it is in the US, but over here, they don't even care about your high school grades anyway... if you passed, it's enough to get you to University, although, in neighbouring countries like Brazil, I believe there are some entrance exams - "Vestibular" - which you DO need to study for).
Nuclear does make a big target - but any centralized power system will. Not sure what the effect of a 20k non-nuclear bunker buster would be.
Wow, you Americans sure are paranoid... (if you are not American, I'll be surprised)
The nuclear energy debate has come up on my country, and the #1 issues are the fear of an accident, and how to manage waste. No-one even THOUGHT about the possibility of a terrorist attack. Makes me glad to live in Uruguay.
The distance between London and Paris is about the same as that between New York City and Washingon, D.C. You know how people who aren't on expense accounts get between NYC and Washington, D.C.? They drive.
In my experience, it's only in the US of A that they drive those kinds of distances with no alternatives, in Europe similar distances are always covered by train, and over here (Uruguay, South America), for example Montevideo to Chuy (Brazil) is also 300 km (according to Wikipedia NY-DC is 204 miles or 328 km), and most people prefer to take a bus (there is no rail) - it's still driving in a sense, but we would take a train if it was available.
Germany: 357,000 km^2
Japan: 377,000 km^2
Compare to for example California: 423,970 km^2 ... you'll agree that it's a fair comparison.
.
Rail is not economical for all of the US... but there are parts where it absolutely would make sense
For instance, last year I wanted to go from Toronto to NY... it's a 450 mile distance according to Google, and there are some rail options, but high-speed rail would be nice.
I made the Madrid-Seville ride on the AVE (Spanish High Speed rail), for 60 Euros, it's about the same distance, in 3 hours (compare to 10 hour car ride).
And that's why opt-out should be illegal. No exceptions. Massive fines. That would end all the spam and scamming right there, at least for the legal part (you still have to find and prosecute the guys, of course, but you don't need any huge laws).
Why is the above a flamebait? Is it the second part (the calling the Americans to action)???
Since they don't have to worry about marketing and soliciting advertising, they can devote 100% of their time and energy on reporting on the news to the best of their ability.
Not to mention they get a leftover budget for cool shows like Top Gear :)
Terminal Server licensing restrictions
Someone mentioned Deep Freeze (haven't tried it personally but it seemed to work well at the university)
And very especially, the post about the management and "people" issue:
If this were a management board, then the question would be how do you properly set up your budgets to hold folks accountable for the areas they should be held accountable for. (snip) IT department could institute a power savings plan get no credit for the savings but be responsible for any expenses (new software) to help implement it. And if anything went wrong, some poor IT manager would be left hanging. Can you truly blame the manager for not wanting to stick his neck out for no reward?
The first two points don't sound right - ok so I'm not opening Office documents all the time, but I haven't felt them as "unresponsive" over 100Mbps Ethernet.
The point about the expensive add-ins is a good one, I hadn't considered that possibility. No-one over here has any strange add-ins or stuff, and we do have everything 100% legal (even passed a BSA audit a short time ago)
We DO have a Terminal Server on Application mode which is accessed from the outside, maybe the answer is to set up one of those for people working remotely.
3AM. The phone rings.
On the other end is one of the few CxOs that actually does work.
"I'm trying to log into my system at work to finish up some vital reports for a meeting tomorrow and it doesn't seem to respond."
Ok, it is a plausible story... but why aren't his "vital reports" in a network? Preferrably one with good storage, backups and VPN access?
Every place where I've worked and my father's small law firm all had everything on the servers (usually mapped to), so it never matters where you're physically, if you have your credentials you can have access to your data.
And mail is accessed via some kind of webmail (usually OWA).
Not to mention I'd expect your CxO to have some notebook.
Singapore. Go there. You'll understand.
It certainly fits the "well organized" criteria and it's a "fine" city but not in the...
....oh wait, is that a "whoosh" I'm hearing? :)
Business people have funny ideas. In my experience they want everything integrated and everyone using the same software. They think it's cool that someone that mailed once 6 months ago is in their address book.
I might be too far along the "Dark Side" (TM)... but why exactly is that a bad idea? I think it's a nifty feature, myself.
I'm under instruction to produce some stationary for outlook because the CFO wants a logo in his emails. I've explained to him that it's stupid. I've shown him base64 encoded binary attachments on the mail spool. I explained the increase in message size and storage requirements for sent email. Futile. Like the bit in American Psyhco where they're all flashing business cards, his peer group are impressed by recieving email with a company logo.
Are you stupid yourself??? Why would your CFO care about how many bytes an encoded binary attachment takes, or how it looks in base64 of all things !!! Just tell him "Yes sir, it will cost U$ XXXX in added storage costs, do you still want to go ahead sir?", that's all he wants to understand or care about.
Much like some of us don't care how exactly your car works as long as it takes you there (even though it's not a bad idea to know a bit), your CFO doesn't want to or cares to know how his logo goes.
Even further, if he thinks a company logo on his emails will result in more business opportunities, I think he's right to implement that. YOU are not the target of those logoed emails, it's other people like him !!!
/anti-rant + rant (sorry for the flamebaitish name-calling)
I can't make an argument against this attitude that is anywhere near as eloquent as Eric Flint posted on Jim Baen's free library site.
http://www.baen.com/library/
Jim put his money where his mouth was, and GAVE AWAY book, after book, after book. More, if you happen to be disabled, you can contact Baen Books, and they will give to you NOT ONLY the books from their free library, but their mainstream books that are in print.
Thanks, you reminded me to make a purchase at Baen's. If only for the principle of the thing (and I've enjoyed some of their novels, even Eric Flints' though it was an unremarkable potboiler IIRC)
ere at my workplace (a hospital) we just rolled out Windows XP this past September. We dumped Win2k & Novell Netware for XP and Active Directory. We won't be upgrading for a long time yet.
I made my father's office dump Novell for AD... he won't forgive me easily (sadly, I'm only half joking). Netware was STABLE (of course, you couldn't put half the stuff they wanted to put on top of it). And HP support was crap.
Isn't this basically the business model of Napster? A quick search of their website reveals the following marketing text:
Napster maintains the largest on-demand streaming and MP3 catalog - over 7 million songs - so you don't have to. Never download another file or rip another CD unless you want to. With Napster, you can easily access your music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
for which they charge $13/month.
Sounds nice. Can I move it to my portable player? Does it have unreasonable DRM? And, most important of all: will it be legal everywhere I use it?
Sadly, that's the highest barrier of entry - the stupid incompatibility of laws.
My father has bought perfectly legal Norton software, and has been told it's "illegal" in my country because he didn't "properly import" it, so it would have been cheaper had he pirated it.
If I suscribe to Napster, I'm SURE that AGADU (the local RIAA) won't recognize it as valid, just as RIAA doesn't recognize allofmp3 as valid.
And what if I cross a border? Say, I'm offered a job in a neighbouring country (Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay have some trade and work agreements - called MERCOSUR) - will it be legal there? Flying on a plane?
Stuck between paying for an "I'm not sure if it will be legal" and probably not complete catalog, and an "I'm sure it's not legal but nobody cares" model, I'll obviously choose the second. Please give me the carrot AND the stick, and I'll buy your "legal" media.
It's not as if music is dying in my country (Uruguay) - the Pilsen Rock festival gathers 1/20th of the POPULATION, and they're planning a huge mega-concert for 140.000 people daily on a 3.000.000 inhabitant country.
The chance that you LIKE a song decreases with the amount of music you try to listen to. If you can have 100 songs, you will pick your 100 favorites. If you have 40 gigs of music, chances are you hate most of it, the rest is for your friends or you are archiving it for humanity.
Hmmm... I don't see it that way.
You might want to listen to different music depending on your mood, get tired of a particular band or genre and "rediscover" it later, try out different bands or even genres.
I get tired of some music, and with the help of some websites (notably last.fm) I look for other music to try, like some, discard others, and keep up the cycle.
I'm amazed at the different music I've been able to discover, which I would never have heard about ten or twenty years ago, even if I had the time I have now.
So, would you say my few GBs of Tango are worthless? Sure, maybe I could delete it now, but I enjoyed it for a while. Same for pop, rock, metal, dance/techno and such... and I still haven't scratched the surface, I suspect. There's plenty of music being produced, and even more from the past 500? 1000? years I still haven't listened to (I would never have heard of say, Pachelbel's Canon, if not thanks to the Internet - you'll never hear it on an FM radio here)
The tap water tastes different?
Does it really? Or do you just think it does because you're paying for special water? Chances are your bottled water comes from a municipal water supply anyway.
If you really value purified water that highly, that's up to you. But you'll get much more value for your dollar if you buy a filter instead of paying Coca-Cola a buck or two to make coke without syrup and fizz, and ship it around the country for you. That's pretty dumb. If you're on the go and need some water now, I can understand buying a bottle. But habitually buying bottled water is just dumb.
It depends on where you live. Over here (Uruguay, SA), the tap water is drinkable (and that's about it), but we have some of the best spring waters in the world (see for example):
http://www.pmgeiser.ch/mineral/index.php?func=disp&parval=98
So I think it's worth it to pay a buck a day for the bottled water.
This happened to me too.. Drinking two sodas a day is almost equivalent to 100 carbs (sugar is a subset of carbs).
Is that true of diet sodas too? I switched to diet sodas exclusively a couple years ago... some advised me to switch to straight water, but I want some taste :) - and a dietitian told me diet sodas were OK (but I wouldn't mind some second opinions).
We've had subnotebooks for decades; the Toshiba Libretto springs to mind and was very similar in form factor to the Eee 700. They've always been pricey, often more so than a full-sized laptop, and focussed on ultra-portability rather than cost. Notebooks tend, like most of the computing industry, to try for the best performance available at the target price point.
The libretto was great, my sister got an old one from my stepfather some years ago, and she was extremely happy to browse the web and play the Sims on it. Kind of what she'd be doing with a netbook. Good point there.
Major corp program in vb6.
It works fine.
And that's why, unless you give them a good BUSINESS reason, they won't change it unless it's strictly necessary.
you might think the huge 4x4 the MILF next door takes the kids to school in is massive, but really, it's a bitty little Toyota, and it is a fair chunk smaller than the obnoxious Fords, Hummers, and tricked out Escalades you get elsewhere in the world.
Surely, by "elsewhere in the world" you mean the US? I've NEVER seen an Escalade outside the US, and there are about a dozen Hummers between here (Uruguay) and Argentina (about 50 million people) and they're just curiosities, not something you expect to actually see or drive